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“Judged by the men who have the privilege of creation, feminine painting will always be the expression, wondrous or servile, of a reflection…. Let’s just say that the women don’t so much borrow as refer to. Morisot to Manet, Cassatt to Degas. But there’s one universe where the women are triumphant, that towards which their ideal carries them: Maternity, childhood….”

If you’ve not heard from me lately, it’s because I’ve been spending my summer vacation looking into schools at which I might resume my formal studies after 36 years (got any ideas? E-mail me at paulbenitzak@gmail.com ), in the apparently chimerical belief that I might find one interested in welcoming into its community a renegade arts critic, editor, and publisher and incipient translator who ‘fesses up to his ignorance, only to discover, by many of the course descriptions and most of the archaic, voir feudal, transfer admission policies, that many American universities seem to be less interested in teaching their charges how to think independently than in teaching them what they should be thinking about and how they should be thinking about it, while their admissions departments seem to prime conformity and clonage over individuality. (Whence the justification for calling this a Lutèce Diary; presuming I was entering Parnassus, I sallied gamely back into this arena armed with but a plume, only to be devoured by the lions guarding the academic citadel.) And that if the coursus now caters to every possible non-white male heterosexual constituency — as if the responsibility, the yoke, for paying the bill for centuries of racism, sexism, neglect, abuse, slavery, exclusion, and genocide must fall on the shoulders of academia at the expense of major artistic figures who don’t fall into any racial, sexual, social, regional, or religious sub-category (notably in my field, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Carson McCullers, Sam Shepard, Bernard Malamud, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, with the exception of rare sightings in genre-specific subjects absent from the majority of the courses I’ve examined) — the affirmative action policies don’t include recuperating people like me, age-ism apparently not being one of the isms whose historic and ongoing injustices need to be repaired, at least in the eyes of academia. In American academia like in American politics, second acts are interdit.

Tant pis. My initial zeal — motivated in large part by intellectual curiosity, an insatiable, unquenchable thirst for knowledge and discovery — had been waning anyway, after nearly three months of virtually wading through courses many of which seem to be driven more by doctrinal, sectarian, and partisan agendas than what used to be considered intellectual and scholarly imperatives. Take, for example, the upper-level “English” course (at American universities, political correctness is not confined to the Politics department but far-reaching and invasive) at Cornell University, “The Future of Whiteness,” which poses the inculpatory question: “How should anti-racist people respond to the new racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States?” (Or, how to prove one is not a wife-beater.) Setting aside the numerous intellectually fatuous, voir downright lazy, presuppositions of the question (“new”ly racialized? In what fox-hole has this instructor been living? And what you mean ‘We,’ white man?), already you see the boxes: You’re either a full-fledged Nazi or you’re an anti-racist; you’re either with us or you’re against us. There’s no room — no space — for someone who’s simply finding their way, who’s trying to navigate between factors like life experience and upbringing and the ideal, who recognizes his/her biases and their inherent unfairness and is doing his/her level best to agitate against and equalize them, the ‘ist’ already implying that the person’s sentiments are driven by dogma and not influences like poverty or inherited and learned prejudices. It gets worse with the astounding second question: “What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available?” Which, combined with the first question, implies that only white people can be racist. (Evidently, the instructor has never been to Texas.) And that these anti-racist white people go to college to shop for alternative conceptions of whiteness. “I’ll take the ivory off-whiteness behind door number 1, Monty.” In the name of agitating against racism, Cornell — putatively an Ivy-League college — has posed an infinitely racialist question, to which simply shedding one’s skin is not a possible response / solution. Not that New York State is a jingoism-free zone; inspired by the bucolic prospect of studying in its Finger Lakes location, my initial enthusiasm for the art history department at Hobart and William Smith College was dampened when I was confronted with the art-historical chauvinistic fallaciousness at the end of this description of this course in 20th Century American Art: “This course is a study of American art from the turn of the century to its ascendancy as the center of international art.” The school partly redeems itself with the first sightings I’ve seen yet in any American university art history department anywhere of Suzanne Valadon, who typically (even in her home country of France) gets less press than her less preternaturally gifted son Maurice Utrillo, with one of the two sightings even occurring in a course that has nothing to do with feminism — thus including the artist purely on her aesthetic merits as an important progenitor of, in this case, “French Roots of Modernism,” an innovation only slightly diminished by the fact that the last name of Paul Gauguin, whose name precedes Valadon’s in both course listings, is misspelled in one of them. (The second course, if you’re interested, Genre of the Female Nude, promises to “examine representations of the female nude in painting of the late 19th-century European Symbolist period from a feminist perspective.” We’ll skip the matter of Valadon’s being no more a Symbolist than a sex symbol.)

From the Arts Voyager archives: Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), “Nude getting out of bath” (also known as “Woman sitting on the rim of a bathtub”), circa 1904. Sanguine on paper, 9 7/8 x 8 inches. Signed at lower right. Image courtesy and copyright Artcurial.

I finally thought I’d found a course whose teacher seemed more interested in instructing history than inculpating doctrine, a survey in Romanticism in the art history department at Bard College — until I read that the terrain would be circumscribed by the Symbolist William Blake and “the *academic* Delacroix” (emphasis added), not a good indication of historic fidelity. (The follow-up course will no doubt address the legacy of that well-known Cubist Gerome.)

If you’d assume that an educational institution affiliated with a museum would do better, historic fidelity-wise, you’re wrong: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago can well tout its academic mission as being informed by a feminist sensibility; its mother institution doesn’t walk the talk. Were I to matriculate at the school and try to pursue research projects on two of the most influential painters in their respective movements of the past two centuries, the Surrealist Leonor Fini and the Impressionist Berthe Morisot — promised preferential access to the museum’s collections being one of the School’s major draws for me — I’d be out of luck. Conforming to the sexism of other major museums (notably the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, which should add “Male” before “Modern” to its name to more accurately describe its collecting and curatorial gestalt), the Art Institute holdings offer a scant three works by Fini and a paltry 20 by Morisot, compared to 183 by her brother-in-law Edouard Manet. (Not that post-Impressionist European male artists do much better. Echoing the American provincialism of the art history department of Hobart and William Smith, the Art Institute of Chicago’s collections include just four works by Nicolas de Stael, a handful by Wols, and 0 by Jean-Michel Atlan or Karrel Appel. They may well have been among the leading Abstract artists of their time — roughly speaking, the middle of the last century — but for the AIC they’re little more than an abstraction.)

If this sexist exclusion bothers me it’s not because I have some kind of doctrinal adhesion to a feminist agenda, nor because a school has taught me that this is the politically correct way to think. It’s because as an art fan, an art critic — even an ill-informed and under-educated art critic — and an idealist I would like to believe that museums and galleries collect, select, and share work based primarily on two related criteria: Quality and Taste. A third criterium might be the impact of a work, or an artist, in the development of a movement. (Note to the SAIC Admissions department: “Impact” is not a verb, and “Impactfull” is not a word.) And when I stand the Manets on view in Chicago through September 8 for the AIC’s exhibition “Manet and Beauty” (the title itself is troubling in its reflection of a superficial curatorial vision which misses the point and misplaces the artistic ideal, confounding the Impressionist movement’s scientific-aesthetic-technical attributes with crass beauty standards) up against the Morisots on view in Paris through September 18 for the Orsay’s Berthe Morisot exhibition there’s no question but that the Art Institute isn’t walking its school’s feminist talk: The by far superior and more sophisticated female artist has been excluded (in the Art Institute’s acquisition preferences) in favor of the less sophisticated male artist. (Counter-intuitively, if Beauborg — as the Pompidou is referred to by locals — i.e. France’s *Modern* national museum of art is still unrepentantly sexist in its curating and in the marketing of its attractions, the Orsay, the late 19th-century national museum, and its affiliate institutions, the Orangerie and the photography-oriented Jeu de Palme, have proved themselves lately more open to both female artists and feminist-informed vantage points, one example being the Jeu de Paume’s recent exhibition on the late American photographer Ana Mendieta.)

From the Arts Voyager archives and the recent exhibition at the Jeu de Paume: Ana Mendieta, “Creek.”

Not that the Art Institute is alone in its retrograde view of art history; if anything, in its implied under-estimation of Morisot relative to Manet the institution is only following (and heeding) a long tradition of male critics apparently blinded by Morisot’s belonging to the “second sex” from recognizing her place as a first-rank artist, the painter who along with Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet best exemplified the Impressionist principles. Even the great Emile Zola (whose formal education, by the way, stopped when he didn’t pass his ‘bac,’ or high school graduation test; take that, academia), who at the age of 27 lead a lonely campaign in defense of Manet, his Aix-en-Provence childhood comrade Cezanne, and the Impressionists in general while other critics (and cartoonist / caricaturists) were almost universally deriding and mocking them (particularly Manet, for “Olympia”), if he wasn’t quite as dismissive as most of his contemporaries and successors, who typically limited their praise of Morisot to pointing to the (stereotypically feminine) qualities like ‘softness’ and ‘peace’ in her work, was still unable to see the master for the mother, far more succinct in his reactions to and superficial in his analysis of her work than in his effusive, pamphlet-length eloges to Manet, for this prototypical modern novelist a founding pillar of Modern Art.

We’ll get to the feather-weight treatments of Morisot by Zola and the Surrealist poet and Cubist champion Apollinaire (in whose view just about the only female artist worth extended comment was the one who also happened to be his girlfriend, Marie Laurencin), as well as the more profound and lyrical appraisals of Paul Valéry and the Morisot collector Denis Rouart, in my translations of their observations, in a minute. But first — and without any pretensions of being able to write about art on the same rarified level of sophistication, analysis, or cohesiveness or with the same breadth of philosophical underpinning or depth of literary background of any of these commentators (this is why I wanted to go back to school, you crumbs; bullocks to your other shades of whiteness and your Afro-Pessimism, I just want to be a better — less historically ignorant, more technically astute, and more theoretically adept — critic) — I’d like to offer my rudimentary comparisons of several Manets and Morisots on view in the Chicago and Paris exhibitions, to the end of pointing out how in the very areas where Zola praised Manet as a paragon of Modern principles and tenets Morisot was the far more accomplished practitioner and thus would have served as a better example, but for the lack of a penis.

Despite what I just said, until recently I wasn’t entirely sure whether my predilection for Morisot wasn’t guided as much by outrage at the way her work has historically been ghettoized by critics because she was a woman as by an objective assessment of its qualitative value; in other words, whether my passion for and defense of this artist wasn’t fueled mostly by my own particular doctrine of championing victims of sexism, racism, and any kind of exclusion which ignores talent and is influenced by superficial facets of identity. (As I just vaunted my Zola-esque “J’accuse” virtues rather sanctimoniously, this is perhaps the place to admit that I’m one of the troubled racialists referred to above, influenced by experience and trying to agitate in his public life against the prejudices this has cultivated.) (Another indication of contemporaneous and succeeding generations’ critics’ sexism-determined blindness to Morisot is that they typically group her with the much more one-dimensional and inferior Mary Cassatt. Go powder your noses, girls, while the big boys do the hard work of invention and theorizing.) Beyond an appreciation for her multiple shades of blue and the way they subtly, gradually meld into one another, notably observed during a visit 15 years ago to the room dedicated to Morisot at the Musée Marmottan-Monet in the Bois de Boulogne (Zola may well have pointed out Manet’s preference for a blonde palette and identified his recurrent method of either shifting from a darker hue towards a lighter one or the inverse, but this gentleman prefers the blonde color scheme and gradations of Manet’s sister-in-law — Morisot was married to Edouard’s brother Eugene — whose shiftings are much more subtle and refined and gradations much more infinite), I had to admit that I too was becoming ‘laisse’ with her scenes of women, girls, children, parks, countrysides, girls reading in countrysides, mothers and daughters, and bourgeoisie gardens. At least those among the rare Morisots to show up on auction. (Which retention should tell you something about the esteem in which the artist is held by the real connoisseurs, the collectors.)

Then a particularly diligent publicist sent me high-resolution images of some of the work featured in the Orsay exhibition, and I had my revelation.

Having high-res images in front of you is like being able to examine the brush-strokes with a microscope (or even, dare I say, up close in a museum); besides enabling an infinitesimal analysis of the subtle shifts in color gradation, it also gives you a sense of the thickness of the texture. Not only does subjecting some of the images of Morisot’s work to this hyper-close and heightened scrutiny reveal the seamlessness of the way, say, an arm will blend into a park bench, a hatted head into the surrounding foliage, or a pair of nominally white ducks seem to sink into the decidedly green pond they’re gliding over, but standing them up against high-res images of some of the Manet work displayed in the Art Institute exhibition confirms that there’s just no comparison between the two in the richness or multitude of touches in the tableaux, nor the poetry and resultant sentimental resonance this often stirs.

Manet may well have long been credited as one of the originators of Impressionism (and where it comes to the movement’s Naturalist aspect, I guess I can see the justice of this assessment), but by the evidence it’s Morisot who best illustrates and thus exemplifies the scientific-creative-painterly effect principles most associated with Impressionism, namely the refined and varied use of color, the ability to produce a multitude of shades even within one color scheme, the sophisticated and nuanced eye for color values (Morisot studied for six years with Camille Corot, in his atelier across the street from where I used to live on what’s now called the rue de Paradis, where Pissarro also took his first Paris lessons in painting), the way colors are blended and brushed to recreate and prismatically reflect light and ability to evoke nature, the way small touches of a darker color are employed to set off and highlight a lighter tone, and, most of all, the way her human subjects seem to emanate from and harmonize with that nature. (Zola, in his 1867 essay on Manet — if any of my prospective Art History departments are scrutinizing my scholarship to verify that I’ve actually been able to learn something on my own since leaving Princeton in 1983, they’ll find the references noted in a bibliography below — explains that what distinguishes the Modern era from everything that came before it is that whereas for 2000 years artists were striving to attain the Greek beauty ideal ((where, if one is to judge by its exhibition titling protocols and spic and span art deco bathroom sinks, the Art Institute may still be stuck)), with the Modernists the goal became to directly depict, or read, react to, and render, Nature, in which rubric he includes the whole megilla ((I needed to find a pretense for inserting at least one Yiddish term in this paper, if only to increase my own chances of one day entering the coursus through the rubric of Jewish-American writers, with even past masters like Grace Paley and Bernard Malamud only squeaking through because of the color of their religion, not the quality of their craftsmanship, which would be like only teaching my old Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates in a survey of Writers of the Utica School)): the human figure, the still life, the atmosphere ((“Atmosphere!? Atmosphere!?”)), the flora and the fauna. ((Those sentences broken up by tenuously linked parenthetical digressions is another reason I need to go back to school: I’m desperately in need of an editor, and perhaps only the threat of a “C- for expository straying” will beat some discipline into me.)) Art, Zola goes on, consists of two elements: One fixed, Nature; and one variable, the sentiment or personality of the artist rendering Nature. “This is why I could stand in the middle of a Palace of Industry filled with thousands of examples of art that meets this criteria and never be bored.” ((Unfortunately, these days the art that fills the Palace of Industry — in Zola’s time home to the Salon — in its contemporary incarnation as the Palace of Tokyo is more likely to be denaturized and overconceptualized, devoured by the beasts of post-post-Modernism, than to be a direct reaction to Nature.)) I’d put the cursor — where this shift ((for those artists concerned with Nature)) to the goal being to represent Nature as opposed to attain the Greek beauty ideal, began — at Delacroix. ((At least in the French context; I can’t pretend to even an amateur’s expertise in any other nation’s 19th- and prior-century art.)) Both of these educational, art historical revelations, by the way — that from Zola’s essay on Manet and that on the place of Delacroix in the origins of Modernism — I gleaned ((even though with Delacroix I already had an inkling)) from two books which cost me a total of $7 at the Old Books Market at the parc George Brassens in Paris ((see bibliography below)), and, by osmosis, from many afternoons and mornings spent sipping thermos tea and coffee on the lip of the Delacroix fountain while dialoguing with his Byronic bust, just yards from the French Senate and its machine-gun toting, bullet-proof vest wearing guards at the Luxembourg Gardens, for free. ((As a reminder that the times in which we live are no longer Delacroix’s — we’ve lost so much, with the fear standard too often supplanting the beauty standard! — the guards can sometimes be seen quietly patrolling in the bushes behind the fence in back of the fountain, albeit minus the machine-guns.)) A lot less than the $56,000 yearly tuition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, no doubt, that at Bard (I high-tailed it out of that site as soon as I hit the Delacroix faux attribution),which has erroneously relegated Delacroix, the font of Modern Art, to the dusty historical bin of the academics. Princeton was only $8,000 at the time I first matriculated in 1979 ((it must now be closer to $100,000)), but as opposed to being able to feast my eyes and spirit on Delacroix feted by buxom bronze babes for free, this earned me the right to regard George Segal’s statue of Abraham stabbing Isaac — it had been commissioned by Kent State after police massacred four of its students in 1970, but Kent State thought the statue too dangerous to accept — standing guard outside Firestone Library, an oracular warning in my case considering the relationship I subsequently developed with my university. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m still bearing the wound. It had actually healed decades ago, but the schools I’ve contacted about resuming my studies have opened it back up again with their retrograd transfer admissions policies.)

From the Arts Voyager Archives and the exhibition at the Eugene Delacroix House and Museum in Paris: Delacroix, “Shakespeare, the death of Hamlet,” lithograph on stone. Courtesy Eugene Delacroix House and Museum, Paris.

Notwithstanding the enduring traces of that wound, freshly opened this summer by my encounters with the universities for whom it is apparently an indelible brand (PBI, the Chuck Connors of art scholarship), I’ve sufficiently recovered my scholarly confidence in the 36 years since I left Princeton (Yes, I know that reflection should theoretically be consigned to the parenthesis in the preceding paragraph whose allusion it refers to but as an introduction to what’s about to follow, it can’t be; see above re: more schooling and needing a good editor — this is yet another reason I need more schooling, to better reconnoiter escape hatches when I’ve boxed myself into rhetorical corners) to venture offering some critical comparisons of the respective levels of sophistication between Manet and Morisot, at least those reflected in several of the high-res images I’ve been able to examine from the two exhibitions, in Chicago and Paris. My purpose is not to start a post-mortem family quarrel between sister- and brother-in-law, but to demonstrate how with the qualitative differences — in the very realms in which Zola and others have chanted Manet’s eloge for 150 years — so glaring, only sexism, the fact that she’s painting without a penis, can explain why Morisot has gotten relatively such short shrift while Manet was being lionized by Zola and his successors. I don’t pretend to Zola’s eloquence, let alone Valéry’s uncanny ability to superannuatively use the individual artist to illustrate the big picture (as you’ll see once we get to the lengthy excerpt from his essay on Morisot; the wait is worth it). By way of compensating at least for my not being an artist, I sought the input of a French painter friend who lives down the path from me here in the Dordogne, parenthetically the capital of artistic pre-history. (Who would want me to tell you that she thinks it’s unfair to compare painters.)

But first, let’s set the stage for Morisot with what her collector Denis Rouart, contributing the Morisot entry for Fernand Hazen’s 1954 “Dictionnaire de la peinture moderne,” has to say about her.

Rouart begins by noting that if the influence on Morisot of Corot and her brother-in-law was particularly evident in 1875-76, it was she who eventually drew Manet towards painting in ‘pleine air’ and light, forging her proper style in 1877-79, particularly visible in “Jeune femme se poudrant,” “Derriere la jalousie,” and “Jour d’été.” “She didn’t use a systematically divided touch, but rather grand touches very liberally laid down in every direction, which leant her canvases a particular aspect belonging to her alone. The familiar interior scenes or ‘pleine airs’ that she painted in this style bathed in a radiant and iridescent light, in which the silver tones mingled with harmonies of a delicacy and subtlety rarely attained elsewhere. Exactly characteristic of her genius, these paintings are fetes of light, of a mobility and aerian lightness and of a spontaneous freshness, ceaselessly renewed from 1879 to 1889 (‘Eugene Manet et sa fille a Bougival,’ 1881; ‘La verandah,’ 1882; ‘Sur le lac,’ 1884; ‘La lecture,’ 1888.) This very free and personal factor seems particularly suited to her temperament, which persists in her as a means of expression tailored for her. Nevertheless, around 1889 she became concerned about the danger to the Impressionist vision, too exclusively attached to the atmospheric aspect of the world, and she sought a greater unity and greater respect of form. She thus adapted a more supple and elongated brush-stroke, which suited the form without hemming it in, but in shaping it in its mass and luminosity: ‘La mandoline,’ 1889; ‘La jeune fille endormie,’ 1893, ‘Les deux soeurs,’ 1894. This would be her final style, for she died in 1895…. Berthe Morisot was first and foremost sensitive to the effect of light on the world which surrounded her, she invested it with her emotions, and it’s in her pictorial interpretation that she expressed her soul as a woman and as an artist. She left behind her no ideology, nor systematic mindset to compromise the spontaneity of her art, in the service of which she used only purely plastic means…. Woman…, she found her climate of choice in the intimate atmosphere of family scenes, animated by the simple gestures of life from which she knew how to extract poetry.”

No doubt much less poetic, adroit, and expert (I’m not trying here to be falsely modest, but making another plea for any of the art history professors from my prospective schools who might be reading this to help me be more expert, more adroit, and more rhetorically lean), here are some of my own analyses and comparisons of the Orsay Morisots and the Art Institute Manets, informed by the artist’s perspective of my friend:

Round One: Morisot’s “In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight),” 1875, from the collection of the musée Marmottan-Monet / Fondation Denis and Annie Rouart, versus Manet’s 1877-79 “In the Conservatory.” (1) In these paintings, both artists rely essentially on gradations of four colors: blue, green, red, and black. Yet while Manet follows the pattern Zola, in his 1867 essay “Edouard Manet, Biographical and Critical Study” (first published in the Revue of the 19th Century, nine years later as a pamphlet, issued by E. Dentu, on the occasion of Manet’s personal exhibition on the Boulevard d’Alma), observed in his shadings, either starting from somber and moving to lighter or progressing in the opposite direction, Morisot puts her brother-in-law to shame in the same realm in the manner and rhythm with which she rapidly, subtly and deftly shifts from one depth to another, as well as with the multitude of the gradations. (For a qualification to this comparison, see footnote 1 below.) Why ‘puts to shame’? After all, when I reduce the size of the Manet — the desktop equivalent of stepping back from a tableau in a museum — it resembles a lush color photograph, so exactly has Manet succeeded in mirroring Nature (with excuses to Baudelaire, who wouldn’t necessarily see this medium comparison as a compliment). But when I subject the Morisot to the same operation, it also delivers this quality — of a rich color photograph — only because she offers more shifts of shadings, her painting exudes something the Manet doesn’t: a wistful, almost melancholic poetry. (It occurs to me that I’m on tenuous critical ground with this particular point, having used the juxtaposition of this very Manet image earlier this year with a Lutèce Diary entry to illustrate how I wasn’t getting through to an impassive paramour; but my argument about the more complex poetic pathos of the Morisot still holds.) I sense this particularly in the effect the reduced scale has on the aura around the girl, injecting the regard of the man (and thus the viewer’s) with a premonition of loss, as he observes the child (Eugene Manet’s and thus Morisot’s daughter? We’re left to wonder) looking out yearningly on the sea, like Pagnol’s Marius itching to embark and ready to yield to her wanderlust. (Note also the bars the window frame imposes over the visage of the woman, her face becoming indistinct to the girl, ignoring her mother as she plots her future.) My artist neighbor friend doesn’t read the figures and their regards this way, contending that the man seems to be looking rather at the woman, and that the child isn’t necessarily wander-lusting. To the various shadings I indicated, she added the accomplishment of the vaporous, practically transparent, almost ephemeral curtain, as well as the contrasts in and nuances of the colors Morisot deploys to capture the texture of the fabric.

Step closer to the Morisot, step right up to it, and it offers something else the Manet doesn’t: You see the brush strokes and are once again reminded of the scientific brilliance, the optical skill, that was the Impressionists’ major technical achievement and legacy, to envision from afar while working up close. The technique. (Yes I know, as a Naturalist Manet wasn’t necessarily going for this — see my footnote 1 below — but if this excuses the lack of this effect in his tableau, it doesn’t excuse the lack of according at least equal, if not more, credit to Morisot as a font of Impressionism as that traditionally granted to her brother-in-law.) In one of the unfortunately sparse references to Morisot in her otherwise wide-ranging 1996 study “Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde” (University of Chicago Press) — more latent sexism, or just a matter of even an uncontested heavy-weight contemporary female specialist accepting the inherited gender-biased critical reductions of Morisot handed down to her? — Martha Ward shares, citing Anne Higenot’s 1990 biography (Harper and Row), that “Berthe Morisot complained in the 1890s that the day that art was reduced to a few concepts, engaging everyone, ‘that would be the triumph of Pissarro! Everyone talented and no one a genius.'” The remark makes clear that contrary to what contemporaneous and successive critics suggested, Morisot wasn’t just dreamily recording her impressions of hearth and home and assorted family pastoral outings in an illustrated diary out of sentimental value but was working out — had worked out — a complex, nuanced technical system for Impressionism. (If you still have doubts, compare Manet’s puerile, almost child’s scrawl portrait of Morisot in the collection of the Art Institute here, whose simplicity even Naturalist values can’t justify, and Morisot’s own self-portrait in the same collection here . The former reveals but a superficial eye, the latter insight.)

Manet comes off a bit better in the 1881 “Jeanne” (Spring), achieving an almost Monet-like quality in the way the dimensions and textures of his human subject’s dress gel with those in the surrounding environment, but he still can’t hold a candle to Morisot in the 1879 “L’été”; one gets the impression that if she didn’t put that trait outlining the shoulder there, the arm would have melted right into the upholstery of the chair. Note also — I complete missed this until I saw ‘fenetre’ (window) in the title — how the glass has completely blended into the flora, even as its colors reflect predominantly the habilage of the model. To paraphrase M.C. Hammer for a repost to M. Manet: You can’t touch this.

Next let’s compare Manet’s 1880 “Portrait of Emilie Ambre as Carmen,” from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with Morisot’s 1869 “Young woman at her window (Portrait of Madame Pontillon),” on loan to the Orsay from the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Édouard Manet, “Portrait of Émilie Ambre as Carmen,” 1880. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Edgar Scott, 1964. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (If you’ve noticed that my Manet legends have less detail than my Morisots, this is how the press service of the Art Institute notes them. I’m only as good as my material.)

Except that I guess you could say it goes with the somewhat bulky brown fringe of his model’s vest, and matches the almost dried blood-like splotches of brown over her breast, there’s nothing outstanding or nuanced about the brown wall in the Manet. The best I can say about his knack for evoking the reflection of light here is that one cheek is shadowed, the other not.

Now let’s look at the Morisot, starting with how she uses the same hue in a multitude of places and to create a variety of effects.

Brown shows up in Morisot’s painting not as the dominant color in the central plane but in the borders of a diamond pattern on the wall, which borders, matching her hair, might be pins jutting out from it; in a tress which has carelessly strayed to her shoulder; in scattered rust-colored markings on the white chair covering; on her left cuff; in the almost pinkish brown of the middle slat of wall beneath the window; at the top of the tree seen through the window; above the frames of the windows across the street; in the settee against the wall behind the model; in the rim of her fan; lending solidity to the wooden floor; in the brown-orange-ish tint of the wainscoting; in her eyes and lips; in the inside fold of the shutters; and to lend a patineed quality to the dominant blue of the shutters. In other words, more poetry, lending the scene a quality of melancholy — though it’s a fleeting melancholy which could quickly evaporate, as suggested by the intermittent white in the floor.

Then there’s the geometry, the way the tableau can be broken down into diamonds, squares, rectangles, half-circles on top of rectangles; Cezanne with his spheres had nothing on Berthe Morisot.

All of the above details I gleaned from looking at the image of the painting at a reduced scale, in other words after stepping back from it. Studying the work in high-res — or up-close — I’m startled at the multiplicity of color shades and shifts, and also by the fact that if the figure in the window of the building across the street at the right blurs, with high-res / close-up viewing the figure at the left, resembling a kind of matador, retains his intricate details, almost as if he had been painted express as a miniature. Enlarged / at high-res / up close the foliage seen through the iron grills of the balcony railing becomes more dense, mostly green but infused with blood by the strategically arrayed red. A green-blue ring and a red slipper peeping out from under the gown also materialize.

My French artist neighbor friend noticed a resemblance I’d completely missed in my appreciation of Morisot. “Reminds me of Bonnard,” she said. “In the intimate scenes?” “No, in the intimate qualities with which she invests them.” (She put it more poetically.) And indeed, Morisot’s women and girls sometimes have a pensive, lost aspect which could make them clothed versions of Pierre Bonnard’s model wife Marthe, Morisot’s personages appearing no less vulnerable and fragile than Marthe emerging naked from a bathtub, no less tentative than Mme Bonnard gazing at her visage in a mirror (only they’re gazing inward, even when they’re looking into a mirror). And yet if Bonnard, who for all his vivid and dense color use and his steadfast determination to rest in that line against all the contemporary currents of the latter part of his life, is often described as “the last Impressionist,” this resemblance identified by my friend, which suggests that the younger male artist might have been inspired by the older female artist, is rarely signaled. The works also share (my friend pointed out), even in the oils, a pastel quality.

Bonnard apart, my friend noted that Morisot “paints by touch” and has a poetic manner of mixing colors, infusing them with “a rich nuance,” which is her most singularly beautiful technical trait. “It’s this melange of colors, in complete poetry, which is what’s the most beautiful in her. It’s this that touches and moves the viewer. This quality doesn’t easily lend itself to analysis.” She was also awed by the general richness of Morisot’s palette, and observed the profound sadness the artist manages to convey in “Woman and child on the Balcony,” an oil painted in 1871-72 and situated in the Paris suburb of Meudon, also home to Rodin, his frequent guest the poet Rilke, and, much later, the anti-Semitic novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. (Which is just to convey that the location reeks with poetic-artistic-tragic possibilities, and that Morisot was adroit at sensing and tapping into these qualities. The water-color study for the painting, in the collection of the Art Institute, confirms this.)

Even a doll, my friend pointed out, in the hands and at the ends of the brushes of Berthe Morisot becomes a vessel for expression communicated by her color choices and eloquent touches. (I don’t know about you, but — and speaking, as we were about a century ago when you were a century younger, about inherited prejudices — at this point in the story I am ready to name my highly-theoretical daughter Berthe, or even Bertha, despite the historical baggage the American version comes with. Theoretical daughter responding to theoretical taunts ((“Bertha! Bertha!”)) of theoretical playmates in 2030 as her dad teeters towards his doctorate: “You mean YOU don’t know who Berthe Morisot was!?”) “Painting by touches allows her to add nuances, color. The more unified a painting is” — Manet’s “Boating,” for example — “the less color there is. It’s less expressive, less rich when it’s unified.” This is often why when a painter is starting out, she explained, the tableaux can lack expression; “one hasn’t yet learned, one hasn’t yet acquired the technique.”

Speaking of not yet having acquired the technique, let’s turn the floor over to some of my literary forebears and inspirations who had it in spades, at least where fiction, poetry, and criticism is concerned, and see how they did by Berthe Morisot, by way of suggesting how even among two of these otherwise enlightened intelligences, innate male sexism played a role in diminishing her fundamental, founding role in Impressionism, blinding even great men like Zola and Apollinaire. The translations of the Zola, Apollinaire, and Valéry texts, like those of the Rouart and Mathey citations above, are by me.

In its clairvoyance and courage — Zola was 27 at the time, and still smarting from having being fired from the rag l’Evenement mid-gig following public outrage at a series of critiques on the 1866 Salon the year before in which he basically didn’t like anything, even delivering a lacerating critique of the jury itself — Zola’s essay on Manet is 100 years ahead of its time, not just in his precise analysis of Manet’s technique and regard and why in his view they were so revolutionary, but for his broader, prescient, and coherently explained views on art and artistic movements, as indicated above. (At times I even found myself regretting that he had not stuck to art criticism; the art sometimes seems to have a better chance of standing up for itself, of making its case, with Zola than do the heroes of his harder social justice novels like “Germinal” and “L’Assommoir” of acting on their own, of breaking free from their author’s socio-political agenda, Zola’s only imperative here being to clarify and articulate the art and the artist’s intentions in verbal terms.) The essay is not just a dedicated presentation of one artist, but a treatise on the birth of Modern Art, with an easily comprehensible definition of what distinguished it as Modern, and that should be required reading at every beaux art academy and in every art history department in the world. He even makes me reconsider my own recently diminished appreciation of Manet after reading Michel Ragon’s “Courbet, Peintre de la liberté,” in which the father of Naturalism seems (to me; not blaming Ragon here) almost like a dandy standing next to the titan of Realism — parlor subject-wise at least. Zola reminds me that like the ‘petites rats’ of the Paris Opera Ballet were for Degas, the bourgeoisie were just Manet’s milieu — he was painting what he knew — and I should not be deterred by my own San Francisco radical upbringing into confounding the milieu with the artistic task and accomplishment.

Morisot’s milieu was even more restricted. Not only were her women pensively reading in fields of red poppies or distractedly fanning themselves at open windows while Courbet’s men were off hunting bucks; when Manet’s men were ogling baristas at the Folies Bergère (and distorting the serveuses butts or faces in the mirror behind the bar), Morisot’s (in this setting, I mean) were often off powdering their noses. The difference, though, in the critical regard, was that where with Manet supporters like Zola, who in his novels had a pretty acid view of the bourgeoisie, were able to see beyond the milieu to the craft, with Morisot they couldn’t see the master for the matron, the craft she devoted to painting them, nor even the intricacies and myriad of colors — of touches — that she deftly deployed to create the sentimental effect these tableaux often provoked.

This disparity in Zola’s critical regard is not confined to the gap between his appreciations for Morisot and Manet, but extends to the profundity of his appreciations for other of her male peers compared to the shallowness of his descriptions of her work. (I don’t mean he’s shallow, I mean he doesn’t plunge as deeply into the canvas and the artist’s intentions as he does when analyzing the work of Morisot’s male colleagues.) Listen to his contrasting assessments, reviewing the 1868 Salon, of Camille Corot, his pupil Camille Pissarro, and his other pupil Morisot.

“I was contemplating Camille Pissarro the other day,” Zola writes. “You won’t find a more conscientious, more precise painter anywhere. Pissarro is one of those Naturalists who clutches nature to him. And yet his canvasses offer their own particular accent, an accent of austerity and of grandeur that is absolutely heroic. Scour his individual passages — you won’t find anything else like them. They’re utterly personal and utterly true.”

After devoting more than a page to Jongkind — whose bland landscapes, rendered in a lot less than 50 shades of grey, I sometimes find hard to tell apart — Zola moves on to Corot. Noting that “his talent is so widely recognized that I can dispense with analyzing it,” Zola nonetheless offers:

“… Corot is a painter of good breeding, extremely personal, very knowledgeable, and who should be recognized as the doyen of the Naturalists, notwithstanding a predilection for fog. If his vaporous tones, which for him are habitual, seem to place him amongst the dreamers and the idealists, the solidity and richness of his touch, the real feeling he has for nature, the vast comprehension of the ensemble, and above all the verity and the harmony of his color values make him one of the masters of modern Naturalism.

“The best of the paintings he has on display at the Salon is, in my opinion, ‘A morning in Ville-d’Avray.’ It’s a simple curtain of trees, their roots plunged into the dormant water, their summits lost in the white dawn mist. It has an almost Elysian nature, and yet this is but the reality, perhaps slightly smoothed out. I remember catching, in Bonniere, a similar morning; white puffs of smoke lingering above the Seine, lifting in fragments alongside the poplars of the iles, drowning their foliage; a grey floating sky, filling the horizon with a vague sadness.” (And I remember penetrating those trees in the Ville-d’Avray, a bucolic setting which also spawned the naturalist Jean Rostand and Boris Vian, for a private birthday celebration some years ago, and feeling like I had inserted myself in the painting.)

Finally the Great Man arrives at the Morisot sisters, Edma (who may be the Madame Pontillon in the title of the painting above, elsewhere referred to as “Edma Pontillon”) and Berthe:

“I’d like to cite two small canvasses that I discovered by accident during my desolate promenades in the bare solitude of the Salon.

“These are the paintings of the Mademoiselles Morisot — no doubt two sisters. Corot is their mentor, no doubt about it. These canvasses contain a freshness and a naiveté of impression that gave me a break from simple crowd-pleasing cleverness. The artists must have painted these studies in full consciousness, with a strong desire to render what they were seeing. This alone suffices to infuse their oeuvres with an interest not offered by that many large paintings of which I’m aware.”

Later, reviewing on April 19, 1877 the third Impressionist exhibition, if Zola “regrets” — it should be noted that like Apollinaire three decades later, he was operating under the severe space constraints of a newspaper or revue — that he has “but several lines” to devote to Madame Morisot, he signals that “Psyché” and “Jeune femme a sa toilette” are “two veritable pearls, in which the grays and the whites perform a very delicate real symphony.” (“Delicacy” and “finesse” — read, typically feminine — are terms that come up frequently in contemporaneous and subsequent reviews of Morisot’s work by Zola and others. Who stop there.) I’ve just been looking at the image of “Psyché” or “La Psyché” (scale back up to the top of this article to check it out yourself) — it’s part of the Orsay show — in both high-res (up close) and low-res (from a distance), and all I can think is, “This masterpiece, and all Zola can see is the white?” Later on in the same review he explains, “What is meant by Impressionist Painters is painters who paint reality… to convey the very impression of nature, that they study not in its details, but in its ensemble.” And I can only ask, how could this writer, this perspicacious observer and penetrator of human nature, with his sympathetic portraits of Gervaise in “L’Assommoir” and the courageous, tragic teenage mine worker Catherine in “Germinal” — how could he have missed so much in this painting? How could he not have seen the ‘ensemble’ impression that Morisot renders in “Psyché,” derived not from the white, nor even solely from the subject’s doubtful self-assessment of her faceless double in the mirror, but from the multitude of *non-white*, primarily red and brown marks throughout, an impression that goes straight from the eyes to the heart, an effect surpassing Manet and Corot and matched perhaps only by Pissarro in some of his family portraits, such as the tragic painting of an infant daughter, Minette, who will soon be dead? Zola, that great analyst of the “Bête Humane”!

Guillaume Apollinaire, the Surrealist poet and Picasso pal still in vogue today 100 years after his death from the Spanish flu to which a German shrapnel injury to the head left him more susceptible, does a little better than Zola, at least recognizing how Morisot has departed from what is usually considered to be the aesthetic of female painters.

“It seems to me,” Apollinaire writes for “Le petit Bleu” on March 13, 1912, “that the decorative artists could benefit from a close study of the work of current female artists who alone hold the charming secret of the grace which is one of the singularities of French painting, whether one considers those who are dubbed the French primitives, or whether one is referring to these marvels of a delicious taste and which could only be born in France and which have painted Watteau, Fragonard, Corot, Berthe Morisot, Seurat. Female artists have infused painting with a new sentiment which has nothing demure or dainty about it, but which can be defined as follows: a kind of bravado in looking at nature in its most juvenile aspects. This new delicatesse, which is chez the French woman a sort of innate feeling of Hellenism [Apollinaire had apparently not read Zola’s explanation of the break with the Greek ideal that Modernism marked], one finds in a superior degree in the works that Mlle Marie Laurencin is exposing in this moment at the Barbazanges gallery.” (Back to the girlfriend! Which might explain the disproportionate space the poet gives over the body of his reviews to the inferior artist relative to Morisot, whose name comes up all of twice, the second time segregated into a list of exceptional female artists, in the 520 page compendium “Chroniques d’Art” published by Gallimard in 1960 from which the above is translated.)

If Paul Valéry as well can’t help praise the stereotypically feminine quality of ‘grace’ in the second sentence of his long reflection, “Berthe Morisot,” collected in “Essays about art” (Gallimard, 1934), for the rest of the essay he heads in the opposite direction of Apollinaire; instead of confining and contextualizing Morisot as a female artist, he uses her as the departure point for a larger meditation unattached to presupposed ideas of gender: The eyes of the artist.

Of the three, at least in what I’ve examined so far in the compendiums of their work I scored this Spring (for a total of about 10 Euros) at a vide-grenier (community-wide garage sale; vide = empty, grenier = attic) near the Montparnasse cemetery where Sartre and de Beauvoir are buried in matching graves, Gainsbourg under an avalanche of Metro tickets, and Dreyfus in a family tomb that also includes the rests of a niece deported to the camps (a cemetery not far from where Fitzgerald and Hemingway met for the first time in a brasserie on the rue Delambre), a ‘you name the price’ book sale at a libertaire (anarchist) social association down the street from Pere Lachaise, and the Old Books Market at the parc George Brassens (another anarchist, he, buried in Sete not far from Valéry), Valéry’s observations (anarchist name-your-price book sale) related to Morisot are the most sophisticated; whereas Zola’s critical aesthetic acumen isn’t up to his trenchant novelistic incisiveness when it comes to Morisot and Apollinaire’s comments don’t have a hundredth of the invention of his poetry, Valéry’s reach the top of Mount Parnassus.

“When it comes to Berthe Morisot,” he begins, “or ‘Aunt Berthe,’ as those around me frequently refer to her, I’m not going to pretend to be an art critic, a domain in which I have absolutely no experience, nor am I merely going to regurgitate what those who know her already know so well….” After noting that these intimates are “educated” and “seduced” by the “graces” of her work and awarding the requisite compliments to Morisot’s “discrete attributes” as well as her simple, pure, and intimately passionate and laborious existence, he notes that those in her close circle “are well aware that the ancestors of her taste and her vision are the luminous painters who had already expired before David, and that among her friends and devotees were numbered Mallarmé, Degas, Renoir, Claude Monet, and that’s about it,” adding that “she pursued without let-up the noble ends of the proudest and most exquisite art, the kind of art which consumes itself, via the means of countless exercises in trial and error that one reproduces and discards relentlessly, ultimately to convey the impression of an art produced from whole cloth and with effortless success the first time out.” In other words, a craftsman who understands that to be effective craft must be invisible. (Even as in the eyes of Valéry unlike those of his predecessors — and even some successors like Mathey — she’s not reduced to the Invisible Woman.)

Here Valéry indulges in two paragraphs on Morisot’s ‘personne,’ the likes of which are nowhere to be found in his subsequent study of her brother-in-law Edouard Manet collected in the same volume, but which at least have the merit of providing this segué to his larger artistic theme:

“Which brings me to my point, her eyes. They’re almost too vast, and so powerfully dark that Manet, in the many portraits he made of her, painted them black instead of the green that they actually are in order to be able to fully communicate their mysterious and magnetic force. Her pupils efface themselves in deference to her retinas.

“Is it that far-fetched to imagine that if one of these days an exact analysis of the conditions of painting is undertaken, without doubt the vision and the eyes of painters will need to be closely studied? This would only be beginning at the beginning.” (A parallel research into the eyes of art critics would also not be a bad idea; a noted New York dance critic — I’m sworn to secrecy — was reported to have a glass eye, which would have put his/her depth perception out of circulation, and when Bruno Foucart, in his preface to the 1983 edition of Zola’s “L’oeuvre,” refers to the author’s supposed myopia, I’m not sure if he’s being figurative.)

“Man lives and dies by what he sees; but he only sees that which he conceives. In the middle of a country passage, observe diverse personages. A philosopher vaguely perceives everything as ‘phenomenons’; a geologist, epochs crystallized, mixed together, in ruins, pulverized; a military man, opportunities and obstacles; a farmer, acres, sweat, and profits…. But what they all have in common is that nothing is simply *seen.* The only thing processed by their sensations is the instigator that is needed to make them pass on to a completely different subject, whatever subject pre-occupies them. They’re all prey to a certain system of colors; but each of them immediately transforms these colors into signs with significations, and which speak to their minds like the conventional shadings on a map. All these yellows, all these blues, all these grays so bizarrely assembled evaporate in the same instant; the memory chases the present; the useful chases the real; the signification of the objects chases their form. We immediately see just hopes or regrets, properties or potential virtues, promises of the wine harvest, symptoms of premature ripeness, mineral categories; we see strictly the future or the past, and hardly at all the instantaneous blots. In any event the non-colored is constantly substituted for the chromatic presence, as if the substance that most concerns the non-artist absorbs the sensation, never to give it back, having fled towards its consequences.

“Opposing this abstraction is the abstraction of the artist. Color speaks to him as color, and he responds to color by color. He lives in his object, in the very middle of what he’s trying to grasp, and in a temptation, a defiance, examples, problems, an analysis, a perpetual inebriation. It’s possible that he can’t visualize what he’s trying to imagine, but that he can imagine what he’s seeing.

“His very methods are part of his artistic space. Nothing is quite so alive to the eyes as a box of colors or a packed palette. Even a keyboard doesn’t provoke quite as strongly the desire to ‘produce,’ because it’s but silence and waiting, whereas the delicious state of lacquers, clays, oxides, and alumins are already singing in all their tones the enrapturing preludes of the possible. The only thing I can compare this to is the tingling chaos of pure sounds and lights which lift up from the orchestra as it’s getting ready to perform, the instruments seeming to dream before they’ve formally begun, every player searching for his ‘la,’ practicing his part for himself alone in the forest of all the other timbres, in a disorder full of promise and more general than all music, which inflames with delights the entire soul of the sensitive listener, stirring all the roots of pleasure.

“Berthe Morisot lives in her large eyes in which the extraordinary attention to their function, to their continual act lends her this strange air, separate, which separates from her.” (Here I can’t help thinking of the way all those ‘taches,’ or spots, my artist friend indicated ‘separate out’ if you look at the tableaux up close or in high-res, this reflection fermented with Valéry’s into an image of Morisot tearing — separating — the color spots from her artist’s soul.) “Stranger means ‘strange,’ but singularly strange — a stranger repudiated because of excessive presence.” (And here Valéry could be talking about what’s happening right now in the Mediterranean border of Europe and on the Mexican border of the United States, only I’d insert ‘imagined’ before ‘excessive,’ or turn it into ‘excessivized.’ This is the tragedy in the politically corrected coursus of, particularly, literature departments across the United States: By topicalizing their instruction, often at the expense of the modern classics, they’ve instituted a kind of revisionist, headline-driven pedagogical hierarchy with an expiration date, whereas the Paul Valéry’s and the Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s, the Joseph Heller’s and, yes, even the Carson McCullers’s and the I.F. Stone’s — the muckracking journalist, indy avant l’heure, was already exposing the plight of migrants being witch-hunted out of the country by McCarthy and his allies in the 1950s — would give them lessons and manuals to last a lifetime.)

“Nothing conveys this air abstracted and distinct from the world like seeing the present in all its purity. Nothing, perhaps, more abstract than that which is. (Rien, peut-etre, de plus abstrait que ce qui est.)”

*”If you want to be a man, to not die before you’ve even lived, stay away from ready-made ideas, from pre-chewed food and from recompenses. If you’re a painter, regard simply in yourself. When one is not sterile, one does not adopt the children of others.'”

— Maurice de Vlaminck, “Dangerous Turning Point,” 1929, ré-édition 2008 copyright sVo Art, Versailles. (Reflections after having served in the Grand War of 1914-1918.)*

1. The only element that might throw off framing this juxtaposition in the context of Zola’s analysis of Manet in his 1867 essay is that the work on view for the Art Institute exhibition was made ten years later. So to assure you that if anything, the novelist’s esteem for the painter had only grown with the years, here’s his immediately posthumous assessment, in a piece written in 1884 — at the express request of Eugene Manet, the artist’s brother and Morisot’s husband — on the occasion of the exhibition organized by his friends and family at the Beaux-Arts School following Manet’s death in 1883 : “The real masters, in truth, should be judged as much by their influence as by their oeuvres; and it is above all on this influence that I insist, because it’s impossible here to make it palpable, that one must write the history of our school of art during these past 20 years in order to mount the all-powerful role that Manet has played.” (By way of emphasizing that my comparisons are not meant to diminish Manet but to call out the exponentially disparate critical valuations of the artist and his sister-in-law and which, as pertains to the relatively little and gender-stereotype tinted ink devoted to Morisot, can only be explained by sexism, I should add that here Zola also describes Manet as “one of the indefatigable laborers of Naturalism,” and seen in this light, what to me seems like the flatness of Manet’s colors relative to Morisot’s may be, er, natural. Despite the sourcing of Impressionism to Manet that’s been passed down to us, this occasional flatness may simply be explained by his not belonging to the same… more Impressionist… school as Morisot.)

“Impressionists, Symbolists, and Journalists,” Jacques Lethève, ARTNews Annual No. 2, 1960. (For the tip to the way the Impressionists and notably Manet were initially mocked by many caricaturists, also touched on by Martha Ward in her generously illustrated book; see below.)

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PARIS — I met someone over the week-end and in lieu of making like Albert Camus watching his telephone for four hours on a dreary autumn afternoon in his pad near the Luxembourg Gardens in 1944 waiting for Maria Casarès to call, it occurs to me that the best way to retain the sensation or feeling this girl provoked — even if it ultimately has to move on to someone else, because I have no idea whether I did the same for her — is not to evoke the details of the encounter itself in this forum (which might rightly put off the woman in question, even if I don’t know whether I’ll ever have the opportunity to tell her face-to-face the effect she had on me, preferable), but to flash back to the last time I experienced this sensation, in junior high school. Then at the least I’ll be able to retain this ability to be almost instantly smitten by a girl — which I’ve not experienced for 22 years — even if I never hear from the woman who triggered the sentiment this weekend again and the feeling ultimately has to migrate to someone else. (In which case I’ll just see “La Strada” alone this week.) If I’m aware that I’m taking the risk of alienating her by making the visceral reaction I had to her public even in this veiled manner, sharing a junior high school memory still seems a lot more innocuous than Camus’s coping mechanism in 1944-45, grappling with his own impotence in the face of a retreating Casarès by writing about a Roman tyrant who kills everyone in sight to prove he’s not powerless against fate after his sister-lover dies.

Her name — I mean the junior high school flame — was Felicia French. It seems that my mom must have already known her mom when they introduced us in the Glen Park recreation center nestled in Glen Canyon in … 1974. Typical for San Francisco — and the girls I had the tendency to fall in love with then — she was a mix of white, black, and Latino, with big luminous Nathalie Wood eyes under her frizzy bunned hair. “Crush” is the closest I can come to describing the sensation, which was/is pure — nothing to do with sex, everything to do with the heart warming over as if stirred by a gentle wind. Boulevarsé quoi. And it’s almost entirely centered on the effect the girl’s visage — and manner, in the simplest of gestures — has on me. (Fortunately, the activity over which we met this week-end provided a convenient excuse for looking her in the eyes; not that I was able to keep it up for long. And I’ve probably already said too much.) It’s a sensation that’s completely innocent; there’s no fantasizing of “la suite,” of a physical escalation. Not even the urgency of “I want to be with this person”; one is simply enchanted and entranced. Tongue-tied, stiff, and awkward. Even the little things the girl (or woman) does have this attenuated allure. And if she looks at you, forgetaboutit it. (I practically floated down to the Seine afterwards and when the Eiffel Tower started scintillating, it seemed a natural expression of what was going on inside of me. Now I’ve really said too much.)

So let’s get back to Felicia French. And to Nathalie Wood. A year after our Glen Park encounter, transferring to my local junior high, James Lick, I found myself acting opposite Felicia in a Tennessee Williams one-act which the author would later expand into a full-length film starring Nathalie Wood, “This Property is Condemned.” In the one-act version, a 14-year-old girl balances on a deserted train track and talks a lot about her dead older sister, Alma (in the film, Nathalie), to an audience of one person, a boy, Tom, whose (thus, my) biggest line comes when the girl explains that the sister “is in the bone orchard.” “The BONE orchard?!” answers the boy, flabbergasted. (A bone orchard — the Catacombs, where all the ancient bodies in Paris are really buried, and where the Resistance met during the Occupation — also served as a sort of oracle to my encounter of this weekend: Et maintenant, mec, tu vas avoir la chance de faire quelque chose pour manifeste que tu n’es pas encore un squelette.) In the play (for which I won the Best Supporting Actor award in a city-wide junior high drama contest in which my opponent was a good friend from my previous junior high, Chip Williams, who by high school would announce he had a brain tumor and wouldn’t live past 20; what have I done, who have I loved — and who has loved me? — to prove that I have?), the Girl/Felicia sings a song which goes like this (didn’t have to look it up; imagine the words being sung in the wistful soprano pitch of a 14-year-old):

Wish me a rainbow and wish me a star,All this you can give me wherever you are;And dreams for my pillow,and stars for my eyes,And a masquerade ball where our love wins first prize.

Felicia and another girl, Linda Mull, liked to taunt me by singing “Soldier Boy,” replacing the title with “Monster Boy.” They even gave me a baby-blue tee-shirt with “Monster Boy” in black letters. This was at my 15th birthday party, which is about when I started lowering my ambitions, girlfriend-wise. Not even dreaming of trying for my dream-girl Felicia, I instead decided to go for a girl named Lisa Craib. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pretty — she was. But I think it was that she was the underdog — the other girls and boys teased her as being flat-chested — that made me think I’d have a better chance of interesting her than Felicia; less competition.

We were playing Truth or Dare in my basement bedroom near the ping-pong table — Felicia and Linda were there also, and, *I think*, even Tracy Wedemeyer, my very first girlfriend (we met in the maternity ward at Marin General). At one point — Tracy must have left (like her, Lisa had long straight blonde hair) — someone (was it Felicia? Did I miss another cue?) asked me this Truth question: “Who’s the girl in this room you like the most?” “Lisa.” When we were alone — the lights must have gone out because I remember assuring Lisa that the unzipping she heard was that of my sweatsuit jacket — Lisa confessed, “Remember what you said? If they asked me, I would have said you.” (This is not the only proximity ping-pong tables had with my pre-adolescent crushes. In 6th grade — when I was 11-12 — I’d dedicate my games over our basement table to Christine LaMar, my very first crush, ennerving my brother and best friend with my insistence on declaring before each match, “This game is dedicated to Christine LaMar. If I win this game, I will be … and …. If I lose it, I will be … and …..” By the time Christine broke my heart by announcing she was transferring to another school, I was able to pronounce, through tears, “… if I win ((sob)) I will be ((sob)) 187 and 9.” Which I did and was.)

Glen Canyon also figured into my Lisa love story; we’d gotten to second base locked in a laying down embrace (whence was born my adoration of the supple female tummy) at the bottom of the canyon, and it was at about that time that Lisa announced that her father — their house was above us on a lip of the canyon — was into guns. (I pictured him already having me in his sights, clutching his daughter.) In my yearbook Lisa would write, “Paul, As Fi (Felicia) says, You are the man of my life. I’ll never forget you.” (Felicia had written, “Have fun with beautiful Lisa.”) We tried to keep it up that summer — the summer before we’d go our separate ways for high school — but the decline started (fittingly enough) over a tennis court. Lisa, a city champion, complained that my game was bringing hers down… Our phone calls also deteriorated, with Lisa cutting the awkward silences with “What else?”

My telephone calls with Felicia, on the other hand, would last for hours, with my mother and brother yelling at me to get off the phone. Couple this with the memory of one particularly graphic dream of me she shared after one of us had told the other s/he was in the process of taking a bubble bath, and I sometimes wonder if I was completely dense in not even trying to make a romantic move. I was devastated when Felicia sent me a postcard at summer camp announcing she’d be going to a different high school, shortly after which around a campfire under star-strewn skies in the shadow of Yosemite I made a move, reciprocated, towards another girl, T.C. (she went by that acronym), and who I was not really attracted to. (And thus assumed would not reject me.)

I know the Felicias don’t always work out as Felicias. (Some of them even remain alone because no guy has the balls to move beyond the hopeless crush stage, assuming she’s unavailable. At about the same time in high school when I was doing — or not doing — this with another crush, Karen Sullivan, I read a story collected in his “Welcome to the Monkey House” in which Kurt Vonnegut, Jr writes about a girl so beautiful she remains alone, because men assume she’s unobtainable. I’ve had an actual relationship with one Felicia — it started out as a crush — in which by the end this “Felicia” of my dreams was showing up as a monster in my nightmares. And it was she who’d made the first move; the relationship would probably not have happened if it had been left up to me, as I’d have gone on considering her out of my league and beyond my reach.)

But I also know that if you don’t declare yourself — coupled with “Caligula” in the paperback copy I purchased for a buck this weekend at a vide-grenier or community-wide garage sale on my way down to the Luxembourg Gardens, Camus’s turf, shortly before meeting this current “Felicia,” was Camus’s “Le malentendu ” — you risk losing everything. In this case, the ability to dream. (I know, Camus probably didn’t have a publicly broadcast declaration in mind, but this is the message I need to send to the Universe right now to increase the chances that if it’s not the person I met this weekend, whoever it is will continue her route towards me.)

And the desire to continue to try to actualize those dreams. The sensation that meeting this woman provoked in me (I put it that way because I’m not saying she did anything express to provoke it) is a sensation that for the last 22 years I’ve only felt in dreams, only to wake up and discover the girl wasn’t real. Against that heartbreak I’ll take the disappointment of potential non-reciprocacity any day. And so even if I will be disappointed if I never hear from this girl again, I thank her for restoring my faith that I have the right to dream and to aim high, to not just settle, to demonstrate that je ne suis pas encore une squelette. And that I can still be smitten and stirred — on first sight — by the face, the eyes, the gestures and the sage words of a woman. Et par l’imperatif de toujours heed the chanson….

…la chanson de Felicia.

Wish me a rainbow and wish me a star,All this you can give me wherever you are;And dreams for my pillow,and stars for my eyes,And a masquerade ball where our love wins first prize.